


ceaselessly into the past

by bossymarmalade (maggie)



Category: DCU (Comics), Green Arrow (Comics)
Genre: Amnesia, Arrow Family, Families of Choice, First Time, Flashbacks, Missing Scene, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-05
Updated: 2014-03-05
Packaged: 2018-01-14 16:57:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1274077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggie/pseuds/bossymarmalade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a collection of timestamp moments in oliver queen's life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ceaselessly into the past

**Author's Note:**

> standard foreword: if anything I have written is problematic or oppressive to a marginalized group, please don't hesitate to let me know and I'll change it.
> 
>  
> 
> I always write Roy as being half-Dine.

**1\. the day after hal brought him back from the dead**

He remembers —

No, he doesn’t. 

He keeps trying and trying, but all it does is give him migraines so blindingly strong that he blacks out. That’s the only thing he’s been able to figure out (apart from the fact that he’s a tall blond fella in his early thirties, maybe, with pretty good upper body strength), is that he’s stubborn. He realized he had great guns when some street toughs had attacked him, stolen the empty quiver off his back and his fancy green boots before he managed to knock one out and scare the rest away.

He’d woken up the day before in a snowy graveyard, the smell of roses pink in his head, thorns from the ones he was lying on leaving punctuation marks all over his face and hands. No words in between, just commas and full stops waiting to be filled in. 

The city is big. He finds a stack of newspapers in a box in front of a house — shouldn’t this person take them to the recycling depot? — and steals some to wrap around his bare feet. Make a bed. Keep warm at night. He’d been cold the night before, huddled in the doorway of a shop that sold boating equipment, watching people stream in and out of the coffee shop across the road. Why are there so many coffee shops? 

It’s too confusing and he puts the question from his head, taking his bundle of newspaper to a different doorway, in an alley behind a pawn shop. He finds a pair of galoshes on the way, set out with the garbage, moldy on the inside. They’ll do fine. He pulls them on over the newspaper covering his feet, sits on the bundle of remaining paper, and tries to think, tries to remember anything, his name, this city, tries to figure out who he —

— he comes to, and he has a splitting headache, blood in his mouth. The green hooded tunic he’d been wearing is gone, leaving him lying in the dirty slush in just in the weird tight green pants. The galoshes and bundle of newspaper are likewise disappeared. There’s a massive bruise forming down one side along his ribs and a sharp smell of piss. Not his own.

All right.

Remembering can wait. He’s got right now to think about. Punctuation marks will have to be good enough.

**2\. the first time he held lian**

It’s on visit number four that he gets to hold her. Visits one to three went past with no strikes, the most careful of conversation with Roy that all revolved around Lian’s favourite tv shows and toys and school subjects, because if there was anything Ollie’d been able to perceive right off the bat, it was that Roy could be distracted from even the most touchy topics if you started talking to him about Lian’s good qualities.

But by the third visit they’re already circling each other on high alert, the wary look in Roy’s eyes reaching a critical level. He thinks it’s just a matter of time before Ollie does something shitty. He’s not wrong. It’s just neither of them will know what that thing is until Ollie does it.

So he takes his chance and when Lian comes in with Roy, Ollie barely looks at her father before stooping down, holding out his arms. And to his great relief, the child lets go of Roy’s hand and comes over to him with perfect trust, and when he picks her up, saying, “Howzy-doozy, punkinbird?” and being rewarded with a giggle, her dark scribbles of hair smell like bright pink little-girl shampoo and his son’s warm skin. Ollie turns towards the kitchen, Lian squirming happily in his arms as he promises her watermelon and airplane rides, and he knows from the way Roy is breathing that there won’t be any more visits for a while.

Eight months from now, Ollie will be killed in the airspace over Smallville, and Lian will be given her first experience in what it’s like when a family member dies. But that’s all to come. For now, there’s watermelon and airplane rides, and her papa and grampa trying, for her sake, to overcome the deficiencies of the past.

**3\. the first time he had sex with dinah**

"God _damn_ , pretty bird.” 

Ollie rolled over onto his back, puffing out a noise that was half winded gasp, half self-congratulatory whoop. “Now I’m *really* glad I went for you and not your mom.”

"Are you—" Dinah sat bolt upright, gloriously naked, distracting him enough that he didn’t see her punch coming until it landed on his arm. "Are you serious, Oliver? All that work you did convincing me that you were a halfway decent guy, and the minute I sleep with you *that’s* the best post-fuck remark you can come up with?" She tossed her hair — long, dark, swirling like ink above her strong shoulders and phenomenal rack — and got up from the bed, retrieving the sheet they’d kicked onto the floor and wrapping it around herself.

"It’s a *joke*, jesus." Ollie turned over onto his side, wincing and rubbing the place she’d punched him. His lady knew how to pack a whallop, that was for damn sure. "I thought since we were at the banging stage, we were at the ‘making jokes about the awkward early days of our relationship’ stage!"

Dinah had been in the midst of striding to the bathroom in a state of great affront, but that stopped her. Turning, she looked at Ollie, eyes narrowing in contemplation as she took in his genuinely confused and hurt expression. Not that he wasn’t still a complete dingbat for saying such a boneheaded thing, but —

"You haven’t been in a lot of actual relationships, have you?"

Now it was his turn to get out of bed in a huff, grabbing his pants and yanking them on. “What the hell, Dinah!” Ollie yelled, pulling his tunic on haphazardly, searching around for his boots. “I say one little dumb joke and you gotta start insulting me? What kinda thing is that to say? I’ve had plenty of ACTUAL experience about all KINDS of shit!!” He dropped to his hands and knees out of sight on the other side of the bed, and Dinah smiled to herself.

Ollie kept up his muttering as he felt around vainly for his boots under the bed, but the feel of a knee nudging his backside brought him back out. “Yeah, what’s the big—” he started. And then looked up to find Dinah standing over him, sheet lying discarded on the floor behind her and her hands on her hips, a peculiar but hungry look on her face.

"You need to learn to shut the hell up sometimes and just thank your lucky stars, Oliver," she said, and he laughed and reached for her.

**4\. one week after bringing roy home**

Ollie keeps forgetting the kid’s there.

In his defense! The kid’s quiet as a whisper, mostly showing up padding around on his little bare paws (“You can wear shoes now, I can afford ‘em,” Ollie’s told him a million times, but the kid avoids the array of rainbow-coloured Keds and flip-flops and persists in bare feet) and watching Ollie from under his frowny forehead. Watching him do all sorts of boring bullshit, like hook up the brand-new Playstation to the tv, or roll joints, or run the dishwasher. 

"Come take a turn," Ollie says, gesturing with the PS controller. On the screen, Solid Snake jitters spasmodically under the cardboard box that Ollie’s hidden him in for the big infiltration mission. It’s hilarious. The kid just stares. "You were a lot more talkative out on the desert," Ollie observes, turning back to the game to make Snake-in-the-box run across a room. When he looks around again, the kid’s gone.

Ollie leaves him alone until dinner. He orders in a shit ton of food and has it all spread out on the dining room table when the kid comes in, scratching at his short-cropped, reddish hair. “I got Indian!” Ollie declares cheerfully, gesturing with a naan. “It’s the different kind of Indian, but hey, points for being close, right?” The kid stays standing in the doorway like he’s frozen, and Ollie fills a bowl with a little bit of everything and gives it to him. They eat in front of the tv, watching a very stupid Mama’s Family rerun. It’s preferable to eating in uncomfortable silence. Ollie swallows down his food too fast, too much fiery chutney on it, and spends the next half hour standing over the kitchen sink drinking alka-seltzer and thumping his chest and belching.

When he finally feels like the fire in his chest is quenched, he goes upstairs and locates the kid sitting in a window, staring outside. There’s a couple more hours at least before it gets dark, the Star City summer days stretching for ages, so Ollie puts one hand on the kid’s thin shoulder (it’s the first time he’s touched him; god knows he doesn’t want the kid thinking he’s some kind of pervert. Ollie’d spent enough time as an orphaned child rootless among strangers to know what *that* was about) and squeezes gently. “C’mon, kiddo,” he says, and waits for the kid to follow.

The bowstrings fill up the silence between them, loud in the yielding warmth of the evening air as the arrows add their voices to the conversation. The kid’s as good as he’d been that first day, taking a tail feather off a bird in flight, and Ollie watches as his forehead smooths out, his Caribbean sea green eyes come alive, his tongue loosens up in a crowing laugh of triumph when he lands a hard shot. “Roy,” Ollie says finally, when they’ve spent the contents of their quivers three times over, “howzabout we start training you for the sidekick gig tomorrow?”

The kid looks over at him, teeth flashing, and then holds still on whatever sound had been about to come out of his mouth. A dragonfly zips past him and Ollie pretends the kid had just been distracted by it.

"By the way, you can just call me Ollie," he says. "When I’m not Green Arrow."

"Thanks, Ollie," the kid says in his froggy little voice, and slaps down his hand when Ollie holds out his own. 

**5\. an hour after meeting mia (as ollie)**

Gotham. Metropolis. New York. Los Angeles.

Ollie read the destination listings over and over, those familiar cities and a bunch more besides, frowning deeper every time his passage through the list came up blank for Coast City. Different fare charge maybe, he figured, as the long line of people in front of him decreased incrementally. Didn’t matter. He’d ask when he got up to the ticketing booth.

Meanwhile, he had a lot to consider — namely, the scrap of a blonde streetwalker who’d made him as Green Arrow within two minutes of seeing him out of costume. Letting her stay at the brownstone was as much a matter of pragmatism as it was charity; he couldn’t let her run around out there with that kind of insider info when had no idea what her angle was. She could just be looking for a place to crash or she could be casing the place for her pimp to rob. Maybe she was looking to shack up with Ollie, even, pick herself up a sugar daddy. 

Well. She’d find out real quick that Oliver Queen was nobody’s daddy, sugar or otherwise.

The line jumped forward — a gaggle of teenagers festooned with Flash merchandise moved off towards the bus stall for Keystone City — and Ollie moved up thankfully. Seeing Hal would help him figure this all out. Ollie’d probably have to weather a few jabs about having an attractive young blonde chomping at the bit to move in with him, but hell, that was par the course. It was Hal. In the end he’d laugh and clap Ollie on the back and shake his head and say something totally bland and banal that ended up helping.

The girl would probably be gone by the time Ollie got back from his Coast City trip. She’d go to the brownstone, Stanley would cook her a dinner that she wouldn’t have to earn with her body, and then she’d split. Probably with whatever cash and valuables she could manage to stuff under her enormous sweatshirt and—

Jeezum crow.

Ollie slung the duffel bag off his shoulder, staring at it. The girl had handed it to him with instructions to “stow it somewhere safe”, and he’d forgotten to hand it over to Stanley when he was asking the old man to drive her home. It was battered and scuffed, and the zipper pull was broken. There was a scrap of some kind of plasticky thread tied to it, the kind kids used for friendship bracelets. Ollie tugged it down and took a look at the girl’s worldly possessions as he stood in the line.

A cheap plastic bag of hair scrunchies. Two pairs of threadbare socks. Condoms. Another pair of shapeless, baggy sweatpants, and some underwear. All of it smelled like cigarette smoke. The worldly goods and possessions of one teenage hooker — undeniably sad, but none of his business, really, not when he was trying to put a life back together. Ollie shook the duffel and the clothing turned over in it, revealing one more tiny thing, so small he wouldn’t have noticed it if the light hadn’t caught it.

One barrette with a big circle of glittery rhinestones on it. 

Some of the little stones had fallen out, leaving empty silvery divots in the circle. It was a cheap piece of crap. The girl had been wearing better quality clothes when Green Arrow had found her tricking with that politician … although, now that Ollie thought about it, that fancy underwear wasn’t in the bag.

He turned the barrette over and over in his fingers until it slipped from his grasp, back into the bag, trailing a couple of of blonde hairs against his thumb. “Sir,” an aggrieved voice came from in front of him, “you’re holding up the line.”

"Oh," Ollie said. "I’m sorry. I got a little lost there." He tucked the duffel behind his elbow, squinting up at the Coast City-less list of destinations, and didn’t realize he was still rubbing his fingers together, seeing sparkles.

**6\. the moment he realized his feelings had changed about someone**

His head was in a whirl from the moment Bruce contacted him to the moment Bruce let him into the Cave. Several moments past that. Ollie made sentences and sounds and gestures but it was like he was acting out some script he’d been given, none of it sinking into the meat of his brain, just slithering around in the crevices. It wasn’t until—

"The same monastery I was at?" 

That sentence left Ollie’s mouth and with it the enormity of this slapped down into place around him. “Yes,” Bruce was saying, “His mother was keeping tabs on you.” He said it as though this were all normal business, a regular thing, keeping tabs on people. Like it wasn’t so hard if you applied yourself a little.

Ollie’d never been good at it. And honestly … he’d forgotten he’d even asked Bruce, years ago, to help him track Connor down. He’d figured that Bruce would have forgotten about it too, that Ollie’s request, hurled at the detective along with an unasked-for lecture about fostering and fatherhood, had gotten lost somewhere in the crimefighting years between then and now. But it hadn’t. Bruce had agreed to help, and had ticked along year after year doing just that until he finally was able to offer Ollie a result.

Bruce was still talking, Ollie realized. Speculating that Moonday had taken Connor to the monastery to settle him the same way Ollie’d been settled there. It puzzled Ollie for a moment, this elaboration on the information of where Connor was; normally, Bruce imparted the facts. He didn’t guess. He didn’t speculate or assume. He deduced, and that came from concrete evidence. Yet here he was, starting a sentence with “I believe” as if the Batman had any room for faith or hope, and Ollie realized with a numb shock that Bruce wanted to help him make *sense* of it. That he could tell that Ollie was overwhelmed and was trying to reason him through the information. It was … especially here, now, it was an incredibly kind gesture.

"Thank you for finding him," Ollie said. And because they’d known each other so long, as men before they knew the masks, and because Ollie didn’t want to ignore what Bruce was going through, he quietly added, "and Bruce. I’m sorry about Jason."

Bruce said nothing. He stood exactly where he was, in cape and cowl smudged with the shadows cast by Jason’s costume in its display case. Its memorial case. “You’re raising that boy in your home,” Ollie’d told Bruce, back when he’d asked, back when it was about Dick. “He fights your fight. Lives your life. I don’t give a fuck what you call him, you’re his father.” Bruce had (against all odds) taken that to heart, those accusations from a hypocrite. Bruce had taken them and been a father, and raised a son.

And now he’d lost a son.

Neither of them said anything else — Ollie left with the information, and he never did go to the monastery or try to contact Connor. Bruce must have known, through tabs and tabs. But he didn’t bring it up again.

It was funny, really. Ollie had, for better or worse and to the great amusement of many wags who coined a lot of derisive names for him, been a Batman fanboy from the start, stealing his schtick and re-kerjiggering it with arrows instead of bats. In the long run he didn’t mind it so much. He’d always admired and eventually — after working with him multiple times — kind of loved the Bat. 

That was the first time he loved Bruce.

**7\. an hour after leaving moonday and baby connor at the hospital**

_Don’t tell him about me._

Ollie’d intended to make the drive back to Star City once he left instead of shoring up here at some dark San Fran bar, full of overdone people having overpriced drinks. But after seeing Moonday and Connor, he couldn’t face that much time on the road. With himself for company. There, that was the truth.

He wondered, swirling the rum in his glass, what Moonday would tell Connor. Your father wished he could have stayed. Your father knew we’d be better off without him. Your father oh-so-nobly decided to spare us the shitstorm of his presence. Your father said he had something more important to do than raise his own baby. He’s probably off fucking starlets and models and not thinking about us at all. Count yourself lucky, Connor, that your father left us the only worthwhile thing about him — his money.

Ollie was socking back the rest of the rum when he felt somebody at his elbow, smelled a perfume that mingled with the heavy, sweet scent of the liquor. “Drinking to remember, or forget?” The woman belonging to the perfume had a voice to match, thick and fleshy and floral like an orchid. Somehow soothing.

"Tell me," Ollie said, ignoring her opening gambit, "tell me — if you had a choice of two things you should do, and one you would be wicked good at and the other you’d suck balls at, which would you do? And!" he held up a finger, "the good one would save a lotta people and the balls one would make two people happy. Maybe. If you somehow manage to not suck so many balls at it."

"When it comes to sucking balls, honey, I…" the woman stopped mid-sentence, peering at Ollie, and sighed. "Well," she said, "logically you should choose the one you’d be good at." She gathered her mane of black hair and shifted it to the other side, baring the smooth dark skin of her shoulder. Something about the gesture, its confidence, made Ollie realize that she was at least a good ten years older than him. Probably had kids of her own. "But in the end, I’d say go for the one that would make you happy. If it’s the one you suck at, loving what you’re doing will make you better at it."

"You sound like my mother," Ollie said, and when the woman raised one eyebrow at him, he held her arm and amended, "I mean you have a voice like my mother’s." He adjusted the sprawl of his fingers, wrapping them above her elbow, and had just gotten up from his seat when a couple of girls came up to them. 

"Hey," the girl with the headband asked, "aren’t you Ollie Queen? Who everybody thought was dead and shit?"

"That’s me," Ollie said. He let go of the woman’s arm and picked up his jacket from the seat it was draped over. "Not actually dead and shit." He tossed some money on the bar and the other girl eyed him, saying, "She wanted to see if you were as cute in person as you looked on tv. I still say you were cuter with the long hair." Scandalized and giggling, the headband girl tugged her friend back to their table, and the woman looked at Ollie with an amused smile.

Ollie straightened his jacket with a harder yank than it needed. It still smelled like the hospital, like the baby he’d held and never would again. “So are you taking me home with you, or what?” 

The woman looked at him for a moment, her gaze weighing this out. “Ordinarily,” she told him, “I’d say no, especially after that little display. But you, Ollie Queen not actually dead, you seem like you need something other than your own thoughts to keep you occupied for a while.”

"Tell me your name," Ollie demanded. She shook her head.

"Since it’s already on your mind," she said, "think of me like your mother. Mothers can be so much more symbolic than fathers, don’t you think?" The woman smiled, turning and heading towards the door. Ollie bared his teeth mirthlessly behind her and followed.


End file.
